The diaries and letters of Etty Hillesum (1914-1943) have a special place among Dutch-Jewish testimonies of the Shoah (Holocaust). They not only contain a valuable account of the Westerbork transition camp during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, they also reflect the spiritual, philosophical, and literary dimensions of Hillesum's important existential search. More than 70 years after her death in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Hillesum's diaries and letters continue to receive worldwide attention and to inspire hundreds of thousands of readers.

In this work, we present a selection of articles originally appearing in Dutch in the nine volume series, Etty Hillesum Studies, published by the Etty Hillesum Research Centre. From this series, eighteen articles published since 2003, now translated into English, are included here. Our hope is that through them, researchers worldwide will become acquainted with a representative sample of the ongoing Hillesum research taking place within the Dutch language area.

This volume also includes revised and annotated versions of some of the papers delivered at the Second International Etty Hillesum Congress, organized in January 2014 by the Etty Hillesum Research Centre of Ghent University.

Our special thanks go to Caroline Diepeveen, Mijke van Leersum, Durk van der Meer, Fanny Mojet, Patrick Schetters, Ron van Uum, and Susan Waters for their help in translating the articles, and to Margaret de Boer, John Cartner, Carolyn Coman, and Ms. Michael Strange for editing the English texts. We appreciate very much their dedication to the project.

We are very grateful to Julie Benschop-Plokker, Louise Visser, and Jaap Wagenaar of Amsterdam University Press for their continued support and patience, and to Caroline Diepeveen for making the two indices.

Finally, an important note to the reader: The quotations from Hillesum's writings are taken from Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002). The abbreviation E.T. refers to Arnold J. Pomerans’ complete English translation of Hillesum's literary heritage. In the footnotes, the reader will find the original Dutch (or German) text quoted from Etty Hillesum, Het Werk, edited by Klaas A.D. Smelik (Amsterdam: Balans, 2012). We hope that this will encourage readers to compare the translation with the original text.